I have been toying with the idea of using a blog as a method of publishing updates to TolkienBooks.net - and of producing a proper RSS feed. Any suggestions for a free or cheap (~$50) script? I am looking for something that I can incorporate into my site rather than a page on one of the big 'social networks'.

It's free, and has minimal system requirements. Depends on who your host is, quite a few out there already have it installed (or at least the tools you need for it.)

I think you can also include a Blogger or similar blog on your website, but I haven't experimented with that (so the browser would still be pointing at tolkienbooks.net, but the blog content would be coming from blogger.com)

I build myself a little script (i did some php coding myself) and so I have a headlines page, a news page and i can go in a backhand to add and delete news, then i wrote a php file which builds the rss feed. It is ofcourse a little bit of amateur scripting, but if you wish I can send the files to you to see if you can do something with it...

By the way, very nice page... the headlines all together (over here at TCG). How can i surf to it from the main page?

There is a "Tolkien Online" link in the Main Menu in the upper left corner (between "Classifieds" and "The Book of Mazarbul").

I am toying with what to include on that page, I want it to be reasonably useful and informative, so comments or suggestions are welcome. The google feed might need some adjustments as it will likely overwhelm the other feeds in sheer number of headlines.

I think I will give WordPress a go when I get a free weekend. I am getting learning my way around php and mysql databases at the moment, with the aim of making my bibliography database driven - I am making progress, but slowly!